coal bed, with no flash, but kindled through and through with the fire of the Holy Spirit Bashful, too, as he was, he denounced popular sins with an intrepidity displayed by but few ministers in our land.  In the temperance reform he was an early pioneer.  For Albert Barnes I felt an intense personal attachment; he was my ideal of a fearless, godly-minded herald of evangelical truth; and he had begun his public ministry in Morristown, N.J., the home of my maternal ancestry, and in the church in which my beloved mother had made her confession of faith.  When our Lafayette Avenue Church was dedicated—­just forty years ago—­I urged him to deliver the discourse; but he hesitated to preach extemporaneously, and his sight was so impaired that he could not use a manuscript.  At the age of seventy-two he was suddenly and sweetly translated to heaven.  Over the whole English-speaking world his name was familiar as a plain teacher of God’s Word in very spiritual commentaries.

A half century ago Dr. William B. Sprague, of Albany, was in the front rank of Presbyterian preachers.  His fine presence, his richly melodious voice, his graceful style and fresh, practical evangelical thought made him so popular that he was in demand everywhere for special occasions and services.  He was a marvel of industry.  While preparing his voluminous “Annals of the American Pulpit,” and conducting an enormous correspondence, he never omitted the preparation of new sermons for his own flock.  With that flock he lived and labored for forty years, and when he resigned his charge (in 1869) he told me that when removing from Albany, he buried his face and streaming eyes with his hands, for he could not endure the farewell look at the city of his love.  When I first heard him in my student days I thought him an almost faultless pulpit orator, and when he and the young and ardent Edward N. Kirk stood side by side in Albany, no town in the land contained two nobler specimens of the earnest, persuasive and eloquent Presbyterian preachers.

When I came to New York as pastor of the Market Street Church, in 1853, the most conspicuous minister in the city was the rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church on Stuyvesant Square.  Every Sabbath the superb and spacious edifice was thronged.  It was quite “the thing” for strangers who came to New York to go and hear Dr. Tyng.  Even on Sunday afternoons the house was filled; for at that service he preached what he called “sermons to the children”—­but they were not only sprightly, simple and vivacious enough to attract the young, they also contained an abundance of strong meat for persons of older growth.  He was an enthusiast in Sunday school work—­had 2,500 scholars in his mission schools, and possessed an unsurpassed power in nailing the ears of the young to his pulpit.